I see that Sir Tim Berners-Lee has launched his “Contract for the Web” – that requires endorsing governments, companies and individuals to make concrete commitments to protect the web from abuse and ensure it benefits humanity.

Two of the nine principles in the Contract concern respecting users’ privacy and personal data in real and meaningful ways.

All very laudable – but then I see that two of the companies who are listed as endorsing the Contract are Facebook and Google.

I think my irony meter has just exploded.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Jaron Lanier’s book: Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, which is a warning against the rise of surveillance technology and algorithms capable of social manipulation.

In the West, that technology is in the hands of private companies (e.g. Facebook, Google), but in China, it is firmly in the grasp of the State. I hadn’t appreciated just how far this had progressed until I read a recent article in the London Review of Books: Document Number Nine, by John Lanchester. He reviews two books written about how the Chinese Communist Party (the CCP) has adopted the internet, AI and surveillance technologies to monitor and control its citizens.

It is the stuff of nightmares.

I’ve just bought one of the books: Kai Strittmatter’s We Have Been Harmonised. The blurb on the back cover says:

This is a journey into a land where Big Brother has acquired a whole new set of toys with which to control and cajole – ‘harmonise’- the masses. It is also a warning against Western complacency. Beijing is already finding eager buyers for its “Operating System for Dictators’- in Africa and Asia, Russia and the Middle East. And with China’s corporate giants – all ultimately under Party control – being offered a place at the heart of Europe’s vital infrastructure, it is time we paid attention.

As Lanchester writes:

Imagine a place in which there’s a police post every hundred metres, and tens of thousands of cameras linked to a state-run facial recognition system; where people are forced to have police-owned GPS systems in their cars, and you can buy petrol only after having your face scanned; where all mobile phones have a state app on them to monitor their activity and prevent access to ‘damaging information’; where religious activity is monitored; where the state knows whether you have family and friends abroad, and where the government offers free health clinics as a way of getting your fingerprint and iris scan and samples of your DNA. Strittmatter points out that you don’t need to imagine this place, because it exists: that’s life in Xinjiang for the minority population of Muslim Uighurs.

Meanwhile, I continue to be astounded at our willingness to trust Facebook. Lanchester again:

Do we want facial recognition technology to be in the hands of the least scrupulous technology giant? If we don’t, we’re too late – it already is. Facebook has changed its terms of service over ‘tagging’ people’s photos a couple of times, from opt-out to opt-in, but the gist is that it is too late: Facebook already owns your ‘faceprint’, the algorithmic representation of your face. How much do we think we can trust them with it?

Not one inch, as far as I’m concerned.

That’s the title of a book by Jaron Lanier. He poses the question:

How can you remain autonomous in a world where you are under constant surveillance and are constantly prodded by algorithms run by some of the richest corporations in history, which have no way of making money except by being paid to manipulate your behavior?

He wrote the book during the final months of 2017 – before the explosive events of the Cambridge Analytica scandal proved his thesis that we are the product of platforms such as Facebook and Google – not the customers – and that the real customers include bad actors who certainly do not have your, or society’s, best interests at heart.

As the title suggests, he presents ten (very persuasive) arguments as to why you should stop using these platforms. And as he says:

…being able to quit is a privilege; many genuinely can’t. But if you have the latitude to quit and don’t, you are not supporting the less fortunate; you are only reinforcing the system in which many people are trapped. I am living proof that you can have a public life in media without social media accounts. Those of us with options must explore those options or they will remain only theoretical. Business follows money, so we who have options have power and responsibility.

I have long loathed and detested Facebook, so when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, it provided the impetus to delete my Facebook account, and I’ve never regretted it for an instant. I confess that I still have a WhatsApp account (WhatsApp is owned by Facebook), but this is only because our neighbourhood and community council have  group accounts. I would much prefer to stick to SMS, but alas, that ship has sailed.

I read (and have monetary subscriptions to) newspaper websites directly instead of getting news through personalised feeds – Lanier writes that when “Facebook announced that it will deemphasize news in its feed: the journalism world celebrated, for the most part, because now it might become freer to connect to audiences on its own terms”.

I use Pi-hole as our home network-wide Ad blocker, which has the added advantage of preventing Ad services from spying on us.

I avoid using Google services as much as I can (for example I use DuckDuckGo as my search provider, and refuse to use Gmail). Nonetheless, my smartphone runs Android – thanks to Microsoft not having the guts to persevere with Windows Phone, so Google probably know more about me and my habits than I do myself.

Instagram and Twitter have never appealed to me; I have never used them.

Here’s an interview with Lanier on the subject of his book. I heartily recommend that you read Lanier’s book for yourself – it is likely to be an eye-opener. Hopefully it may also help some social media addicts to kick their habit.